From the "whittled towns" towns of Saskatchewan to the song of the "red-breasted delivery truck," Bren Simmers uses her unique ability to draw connections between rural and urban, between the divine and the absurd, to create dazzling poetry. In Night Gears Simmers' first collection, her lines demand the reader's attention, whether she is cataloguing roadkill on a trip to the arctic, revelling in the intensity of a thunderstorm at a fire lookout, or unfolding the silent pain of small-town life.

Bren Simmers is the author of one previous book of poetry, Night Gears (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010). She is the winner of an Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Award, was a finalist for The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize and has been twice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan, 2013). She currently lives in Squamish, BC.

Bren Simmers' profile page

"Continuing the tradition of park-employed poets, but unlike her naturalist fellows, Simmers specializes in the confluence of modern life and nature. In some poems she escapes the isolation of a forest-fire tower with earbuds and another romantic comedy. In others, nature offers a brief escape, like cracking open a window." - The Telegraph-Journal

"Most notable is Simmers' panoramic movement inside the serial poem, where she finds both the stride and space to wander in her surroundings. At times she takes in more than might be necessary, but it is clear Simmers is at the service of desire, which at every turn finds poems flashing before her: "Slowing down to catch / something hightail it into the brush-- / into what lies beyond / our lives' scenic corridors." - Winnipeg Free Press

"Readers can?t help but visualize her muses, whether they are tiny insects or a gentle giant, like a thousand-pound moose...The pictures Simmers artfully paints with her words are not always rural, rather she excels at blending nature with modernity, the two often clashing." - H Magazine